The Story Factor: 2nd Revised Edition

What's your story? Who are you? Why are you here? Anyone who seeks to influence others must face these questions. Whether you're proposing a risky new venture, trying to close a deal, or leading a charge against injustice, you have a story to tell. Tell it well and you create a shared experience with your listeners than can have profound results.

The Art of Storytelling: Easy Steps to Presenting an Unforgettable Story

Many of us would love to hold the attention of a crowd, a classroom, or just a group of our friends by telling them a great story. We have felt the pressure of a public presentation or the disappointment of a story that is ignored and we are ready for more. In The Art of Storytelling, John Walsh talks through the steps to presenting a compelling story, outlining the strategies that helped him move from stutterer to storyteller as he fulfilled his calling of becoming a preacher.

Long Story Short: The Only Storytelling Guide You'll Ever Need

Did you ever wish you could tell a story that leaves others spellbound? Storytelling teacher and champion Margot Leitman will show you how! With a fun, irreverent, and infographic approach, this guide breaks a story into concrete components with ways to improve content, structure, emotional impact, and delivery through personal anecdotes, relatable examples, and practical exercises.

Lead with a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives That Captivate, Convince, and Inspire

Storytelling has come of age in the business world. Today, many of the most successful companies use storytelling as a leadership tool. The reason for this is simple: Stories have the ability to engage an audience the way logic and bullet points alone never could. Whether you are trying to communicate a vision, sell an idea, or inspire commitment, storytelling is a powerful business tool that can mean the difference between mediocre results and phenomenal success.

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts

How can we create and market creative works that achieve longevity? Holiday explores this mystery by drawing on his extensive experience working with businesses and creators such as Google, American Apparel, and the author John Grisham as well as his interviews with the minds behind some of the greatest perennial sellers of our time.

Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell - and Live - the Best Stories Will Rule the Future

The story wars are all around us. They are the struggle to be heard in a world of media noise and clamor. Today, most brand messages and mass appeals for causes are drowned out before they even reach us. But a few consistently break through the din, using the only tool that has ever moved minds and changed behavior - great stories. With insights from mythology, advertising history, evolutionary biology, and psychology, viral storyteller and advertising expert Jonah Sachs takes listeners into a fascinating world of seemingly insurmountable challenges and enormous opportunity.

Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

Our new digital landscape has spawned an entrepreneurial culture and the belief that anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection has the power to change the world - to create an idea that flies. But for every groundbreaking business that started this way, a thousand others have stalled or failed. Why? What's the secret to success? What do Khan Academy, the GoPro camera, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and Kickstarter have in common?

Made to Stick

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

In The Sense of Style, the best-selling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the 21st century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Since its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell's revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In this book, Campbell outlines the Hero's Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world's mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.

Sapiens

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us sapiens? In this bold and provocative audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

Nothing "goes viral". If you think a popular movie, song, or app came out of nowhere to become a word-of-mouth success in today's crowded media environment, you're missing the real story. Each blockbuster has a secret history - of power, influence, dark broadcasters, and passionate cults that turn some new products into cultural phenomena. In his groundbreaking investigation, Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson uncovers the hidden psychology of why we like what we like.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful, but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs and then hops back in time from there in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Emotions feel automatic to us; that's why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author's Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development

Have you written a story with an exciting concept and interesting characters - but it just isn't grabbing the attention of readers or agents? It's time to look deeper into the story beats that create realistic and compelling character arcs. Internationally published, award-winning novelist K.M. Weiland shares her acclaimed method for achieving memorable and moving character arcs in every book you write.

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us.

Publisher's Summary

Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why?

In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life's complex social problems - just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?

Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more "truthy" than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler's ambitions were partly fueled by a story. But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral - they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.

We humans crave narratives. From ancient fire circles to books to radio and movies to TV sets, headphones, and computers, "story is the glue of human social life."

This short listen may not bring to light any really new concepts, but it offers interesting examples of how we use stories for education, entertainment, and reassurance that there is meaning in life. Gottschall also alerts us to reasons why we should be aware that this tendency also opens us up to the possibility of misinterpreting and being manipulated. We long for patterns and reasons - can conspiracy theories be far behind?

I especially enjoyed the discussion about ways in which new technologies are changing how we tell and experience stories -- from so-called "reality" shows to interactive and role-playing computer games.

The narrator is OK, but I wonder why he felt he had to deliver some quotes in quite bizarre accents. The book starts slowly but picks up in energy and interest as it goes along. I think most people interested in books and psychology will enjoy it.

If you stop to think about it, stories are the framework around which we build our understanding of reality--whether the stories revolve around history, religion, myth, nationality, science, gaming, drama, fiction or our own lives.

This is Gottschall's premise and he makes his case pretty convincingly. The book does drag in parts and significant sections consist of summaries of materials covered in more depth in other books. However, unlike some other reviewers, I particularly enjoyed the sections on brain science and the role story plays in our dreams, in mental illness and in the development of human culture. In one example, the author contends that at root, the malaise of depression is the loss of our own story and the effectiveness of talk therapy is in helping us to rebuild our own personal narratives. Although the author doesn't take this step, one might argue that whenever a story loses its vitality, whether it is the story of a nation, culture or religion, it is only a matter of time before the demise of that institution inevitably follows.

Not surprisingly perhaps given his premise, the best parts of this book are in the stories. Narration is sub-par particularly when the narrator ineptly (and distractingly) attempts various accents.

As a student of cognitive science and storytelling, this book tied a lot of my interests together and brought me to a higher level of understanding about story. It was well written and researched - not pseudo science or pop psychology like so many books are these days - and though it's not at all a self-improvement book, the ideas it shares will will help you improve yourself.

The book tells how our brains and experiences are wired up for creating, living and furthering the art of storytelling in our lives. Get's a bit dry every now and then, but still a fairly good listen for anyone interested in books. I was listening to it in between travels to four countries... so, it took me a while :)

I thought I was getting a book on storytelling techniques. What I got was how stories were important to us in the past. Which wouldn't be too bad if it didn't lean so much on evolution. It was annoying all the way to the end.

They really threw me a curve with this one. Not at all what I expected. It was more of a book about the brain. I thought I was listening to a required lecture in Medical School. While there were a few interesting facts, overall it was boring and tedious.

What was most disappointing about Jonathan Gottschall’s story?

Much too medical and biological in nature.

What three words best describe Kris Koscheski’s performance?

Saved the listen.

What character would you cut from The Storytelling Animal?

Character? There was a character?

Any additional comments?

Take a cue from author Malcolm Gladwell. This type of subject could have been presented in a much more powerful and entertaining manner.

This is an interesting book and looks at the human need for stories from a variety of angles which I enjoyed. The reason I dropped an overall star was because at times it feels terribly overwritten. It felt as though the editor told Jonathan Gottschall that each chapter had to be this long. Although having made his point in each chapter, the author noticed he hadn't reached the word count then padded it out. I may be wrong, but it felt that way.Secondly, I have to mention the reader. Please, whoever directs or produces these books, do not let them do accents unless they are competent. In this case the accents the reader attempts (for no obvious reason aside from the fact that they are referring to English writer etc) are dreadful and totally detract from the importance of what he is reading.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Alek

2/1/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Exciting but not extremely practical"

The book is full of interesting facts and research, stories and reasons for them to exist. But it is hard to draw something practically useful from the book. This could be because I needed a kind of more practical guide on storytelling but not reasoning about why stories exist and how they evolve.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Brenda

Dunstable, United Kingdom

4/13/13

Overall

"The value of using stories"

As a trainer, I am aware of the value of using stories to deliver a message. Stories do seem to generate more interest and, as people 'lean toward' the story, they also lean toward the storyteller. When I use stories, I notice that people seem to 'get it'. They also seem to then generate their own stories, to help them create something meaningful. This book can be a useful starting point to learning how stories may help you get your message across. It is generally agreed that stories 'stick' and are remembered and repeated more easily. This book is certainly worth a listen.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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